It was the 1990s. The army descended upon Kashmir to quell a massive armed rebellion against Indian rule. They entered not just the land, but also the lives of its people, fracturing their idea of home and punctuating their days and nights with curfews.\nThis extraordinary collection brings together the stories of some of those people probing the quandaries of their precarious existence. There is that ex-militant whose past continues to stalk his present; the wife who begins to dress like her husband after losing him to a crossfire. There is the boy who obsessively follows President Obama's India visit, hoping to hear him mention the 'K' word; and the man whose transistor triggers paranoia in his neighbourhood.\nUnassuming yet hard-hitting, Scattered Souls journeys through a destroyed Kashmir swaddled in the memories of its fragile beauty.\n
Author Info
SHAHNAZ BASHIR was born and brought up in Kashmir. His widely reviewed and critically lauded debut novel The Half Mother won the Muse India Young Writer Award 2015. His short fiction, memoir essays, poetry and reportage have been widely published and anthologised. In its New Year special issue of January 2016, Kashmir Life, a popular weekly tabloid of Jammu and Kashmir, profiled Shahnaz as 'one of the nine impact makers to stand out in the 12.5 million population of the state'. Shahnaz teaches narrative journalism and conflict reporting at the Central University of Kashmir, Srinagar. He is a university gold medallist in journalism and was also awarded the prestigious Shamim Ahmad Shamim Memorial Kashmir Times Award 2007. He is currently working on his third book.
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